The
Yangtze River is the longest river in Asia and third longest
in the world. The headwaters of the Yangtze are situated at an elevation
of about 16,000 feet in the Kunlun Mountains in the southwestern section
of Qinghai. It flows generally south through Sichuan into Yuanan then northeast
and east across central China through Sichuan, Hubei, Auhui, and Juangsu
provinces to its mouth, 3,720 miles, in the East China Sea north of Shanghai.
The river has over 700 tributaries but the principal tributaries are the
Hun, Yalong, Jialing, Min, Tuo Jiang, and Wu Jiang. The climate ranges from
96 degrees in the summer to cold, brisk temperatures in the winter. Precipitation
is high due to the height of the mountains.

China covers an area of almost
3.7 million square miles and is the most populous country on earth having
more than one billion people. The bordering countries include Mongolia,
Kazakhstan, India, Nepal, Burma, Vietnam and Korea. The People's Republic
is led by Chinese Communist Party and governed by the State Council. The
main language spoken is the Mandarin dialect of Chinese but there are
more than 150 languages and dialects spoken throughout the country. Approximately
350 million people inhabit the region of the Yangtze. There is plenty
of wildlife along the river as well which include the Tibetan antelopes,
Mongolian gazelles, and snow leopards, just to name a few.

Waters of the Yangtze are often
used for rice and wheat irrigation. It also has enormous and inexhaustible
hydroelectric resources. In 1995 construction began on the Three Gorges
Dam near Yichang and is scheduled for completion in 2009. The dam will
measure about 600 feet and about 1.5 miles wide. The dam is expected to
help control the flooding of the Yangtze River Valley. The Three Gorges
(the Qutang Gorge, the Wuxia Gorge, and Xiling Gorge) will also be the
largest electricity generating facility in the world. The hydroelectric
generators will provide 1/9 of China's total power output.

There is a lot of controversy
surrounding the construction of the dams. There are 140 villages, 1,600
factories and over 80,000 acres of growable land that will be destroyed.
It may also cause animals to become extinct. The area is very prone to
earthquakes because it lies directly on a fault line. Actually, the plateau
and gorges were created by collision of the Indian-Australian plate, drifting
northward, with the Eurasian plate that began over 40 million years ago
and continues today.

Yang
Xin & Gerald Yang will be joining us as online guests for
the Yangtze River!

Betsy Damon's
River Art

An American Environmental Artist
in China

Chengdu, China. In Betsy
Damon's Keepers of the Waters Project, one artist took a series of photographs,
made a collection of prints, and, in a public display, allowed the images
to visibly decompose in shallow dishes of polluted river water. Click
here to learn more.